WaveLab 11/12 on high-resolution (4K 5K 8K high-dpi HiDPI) monitors

ultradust · October 12, 2023, 1:45pm

A quick note and comparison on WaveLab vs. Cubase re: @TheAndyMac 's notes on this issue…

For many affected plugins, Cubase does offer a better default view. It also offers the ability to resize windows for many plugins, which seems to solve the too-small issue about 50% of the time. Some examples of Cubase’s success in this area over WaveLab are posted below.

That said, other developers as noted above (TopTen, Blue Cat, Audified, etc.) have developed solutions to this issue for their plugin hosting tools which seem to work for almost 100% of plugins tested. So while the Cubase team has partially resolved this issue (possibly through plugin resizing), there are other developers who appear to have completely solved it (likely through per-window scaling).

Also, it is interesting to note that some current Steinberg plugins (Rev-X; Compressor 276; Sweet Spot Morphing Channel Strip; etc.) display too small in WaveLab (see examples below). If Steinberg itself does not comply with the best practices necessary to display plugins usefully in WaveLab, it may be unreasonable to expect that the entire spectrum of 3rd-party developers would do so.

Just a few quick WaveLab vs. Cubase examples, where the Cubase approach solves the issue. Screenshots taken on same screen (3840x2160, 150% Windows scaling) on the same Windows 10 computer with both applications full-screen. Please note: These examples are just a few among thousands of other affected plugins; they are simply a few quick examples to show where Cubase displays them more nicely than WaveLab on a 4K screen. Of course, some of these particular examples are not really mastering plugins, but that’s not the point; they are just quick examples of how plugins display in WaveLab vs. Cubase.

Steinberg Yamaha Compressor 276 in WaveLab Pro 11